Uuuuuuuuuugh
Jun. 27th, 2019 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beehammerSo, my sideline in original fiction is one of those almost but not quite things where I get just enough success to keep gamely plowing along with it but never enough to feel like I'm exactly making progress. Which is fine, because that's, I mean, not precisely what you'd expect from a personal decision to write whatever the fuck you want and try to sell it after the fact instead of trying to cater to the current market, but pretty fucking close to what you'd expect from that philosophy.
But it also means I get a lot of emails back from editors that boil down to "Your writing is tits but I asked myself 'what the fuuuuuuuuuuck' three separate times while reading this, so just, you know, keep us in mind if you ever feel like writing something another human being could relate to without being high on something."
All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that Jo Walton's writing feels like this personally-tailored punishment for all the times I've looked at a piece and said, "Fuck it, the slush readers've seen worse."
Walton writes really well, and the craft is there, and the structure is there, and then everything about the characters and the plot leaves me going "Surely something has to happen soon, right?"
Almost 200 pages into Lent. That's when something finally fucking happens. I keep getting sucked in with the prose and the promise of more and then it's like, "Nope! This is a 340-page treatise about obscure Platonic philosophy, which you loathe with a passion, roughly disguised as a novel!" and I fall for it every. fucking. time.
So basically I regret every minute I spent reading Lent and also recognize that it's some spitefully profound commentary on both my entire relationship to Walton's body of work as well as my entire relationship with the genre-lit world, which manages to bump the regret into active resentment. It's like the novel as performance art piece, and I don't know what to do with it except yell "What the fuuuuuuuuuuck?" at the heavens.
But it also means I get a lot of emails back from editors that boil down to "Your writing is tits but I asked myself 'what the fuuuuuuuuuuck' three separate times while reading this, so just, you know, keep us in mind if you ever feel like writing something another human being could relate to without being high on something."
All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that Jo Walton's writing feels like this personally-tailored punishment for all the times I've looked at a piece and said, "Fuck it, the slush readers've seen worse."
Walton writes really well, and the craft is there, and the structure is there, and then everything about the characters and the plot leaves me going "Surely something has to happen soon, right?"
Almost 200 pages into Lent. That's when something finally fucking happens. I keep getting sucked in with the prose and the promise of more and then it's like, "Nope! This is a 340-page treatise about obscure Platonic philosophy, which you loathe with a passion, roughly disguised as a novel!" and I fall for it every. fucking. time.
So basically I regret every minute I spent reading Lent and also recognize that it's some spitefully profound commentary on both my entire relationship to Walton's body of work as well as my entire relationship with the genre-lit world, which manages to bump the regret into active resentment. It's like the novel as performance art piece, and I don't know what to do with it except yell "What the fuuuuuuuuuuck?" at the heavens.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-28 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-28 11:44 pm (UTC)It's not that they're lying or have bad taste--it's just that they're written by people for whom Walton is Their Jam and a new Walton book is a deeply exciting thing and it's easy to get swayed by their enthusiasm into giving it another go which will ironically go about as well as the first few iterations.